Why Flare Jeans is Less Popular in Hong Kong than Skinny Jeans?

When it comes to buying jeans, Hong Kong girls always prefer skinny jeans to flare jeans, almost 7 out of 10 are wearing a pair of skinnies on the street (from what I observed), fashion houses' sales of skinny jeans is also much higher than that of flare jeans. Why Hong Kong girls don't like flare jeans?


1. The desire to have long legs
The pictures of tall Caucasian models with long legs on fashion magazines have deeply ingrained into Hong Kong girls' mind. The combination of skinny jeans and high heels creates an ensemble of a thinner bottom and makes the legs appear to be longer, hence they think that the smaller the opening of the jeans, the skinnier their legs can look like. In particular, they like wearing loose top with skinny jeans to emphasis their bottom body's slimness.

2. The unwillingness to show hips
Flare jeans is renowned for showing your hips. But girls in Hong Kong don't seem to like showing their rear-end shape because of the general perceptions that having big hips means being fat, and it's very insulting to say a girl is fat in Hong Kong. A lot of Hong Kong guys also prefer girls having long legs rather than big buttock. Guys always like skinny girls and they feel more proud carrying a long-legs girl than a big-hips girl on the streets.

3. Skinny fever
Girls have been obsessed with getting more and more skinny. There are advertisements of slimming products everywhere in the press and public transportation. In this sense, wearing skinny jeans serves as an intangible measurement of girls' weight, it's the easiest mechanism to convey your body shape to others by showing the complete shape of your lower body, hence the smaller the size and the tighter the jeans, the thinner the girls.

Now girls are starving themselves just to buy a pair of size 00 skinny jeans with 23" waist. Of course they can also show their skinniness by buying a size 00 flare jeans, but it would be less obvious because your shanks cannot be fully shown - it's more difficult and costly to tell people they are skinny.


In fact, flare jeans create a even better visual effect of having a tall bottom body than skinny jeans, but Hong Kong girls think that it's more important to show that you not only look tall but also have a pair of skinny legs at the same time. In this sense, it seems that only skinny jeans can meet their requirements.

Despite all the craze over skinny jeans, with the influx of international fashion brands into Hong Kong, girls seem to start embracing the beauty of flare jeans and showing their hips. Globalization has been playing a role in Hong Kong, a consumption-based city. It would be interesting to see how the trend of jeans evolves over time.